The Trump Opportunity by Daniel Henninger
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trump-opportunity-1478737144
Now what?
Nothing will be more important to getting that answer right in the Trump victory period than separating fact from abundant fiction.
The 2016 presidential campaign was a magic mushroom tour through the American psyche—its voters, its politicians and not least the exotic varieties of people who populate what we call “the media.”
For all of them, the Trump candidacy seemed to be a national Rorschach inkblot. Everyone looked at the same Trump events, Trump speeches and Trump polls and interpreted them as individual political biases and desires.
There was one exception to this mania: the collective wisdom of the American voter.
In normal times—and these are not normal times—it would have been impossible for a candidate outputting Donald Trump’s chamber of spoken and personal horrors to win. (Sometime in the next year, John McCain deserves an apology.)
What we learned on Nov. 8, 2016, was that voters looked past or through all the atmospheric debris of this campaign and focused on what mattered—the direction of their country. Its economy, its politics and the state of the culture.
One stunning example. White evangelical Christians voted by 81% for the nation’s leading proponent of the Playboy philosophy. They blew past that because they knew that Mr. Trump’s personal life would not bring into the Oval Office the Democratic Party’s triumphant secularism. That is the philosophy that sued Hobby Lobby and the Little Sisters of the Poor into religious obeisance and elevated transgender bathrooms to a litmus test. Thus, their vote.
Another fable propagated everywhere during the campaign, and especially in the time since the Trump victory is that he had unearthed some unknown catacomb of lower-middle-class anger . . . at everything. Mr. Trump himself tagged “globalization” with the blame.
Let us be clear about the economic status of the American middle class, and indeed of the middle-class people in low-growth Europe responding to populist appeals there. Economic life isn’t bad weather. It is the result of politics. Wrong political decisions have economic consequences.
We didn’t have this sense of ennui or dissatisfaction during the growth years of the Reagan presidency in the 1980s or the Clinton presidency in the 1990s. CONTINUE AT SITE
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